Management

Tom Griffis

Chairman

Mr. Griffis has over 30 years of experience in the resource industry focused on financing and developing mineral assets located in North and South America, Africa and Central Asia. He is the founder of Griffis Capital, a private investment and corporate management firm based in Toronto, Canada and Takoradi, Ghana. Griffis Capital has focused the majority of its activities on natural resource, technology and healthcare companies requiring early- to mid-stage financing. The focus of past activities has been in resource-based assets located in Ghana, Argentina, Kazakhstan, USA and Canada and technology and healthcare companies with a primarily North America focus. Mr. Griffis has founded and served on the Board of Directors of several private and publicly traded companies in the resource, technology and healthcare sectors. Previously, Mr. Griffis was a pilot in the Canadian Armed Forces. During his 20 years of service he held several positions of command including as pilot and commander of the Canadian national aerobatic team the Snowbirds.

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Clinton Smyth

CEO

Mr. Smyth is a geologist and software developer with 40 years of experience in minerals exploration, resource evaluation and mining, 25 of those with one of the largest mining companies in the world. He began his career as a De Beers Consolidated Mines student at the University of Cape Town in 1974, moving to the Anglo American Corporation of South Africa with a BSc (Hons) in geochemistry in 1978. He served Anglo American in diverse roles throughout Africa and Australasia. In 1985 he was sent by Anglo American to Imperial College, London, to study artificial intelligence applications in geology, and in 1996 he moved to Singapore to establish Anglo American's exploration presence in that region. During his career with Anglo, he held various responsibilities in exploration geochemistry, resource evaluation, software development and corporate management. Mr. Smyth and his team discovered the Buzwagi deposit in Tanzania in 1996; the Boyongan Cu-Au porphyry deposit in the Philippines in 1999; and GT Gold Corp’s Saddle Gold Project in British Columbia’s Golden Triangle in 2014.

In 2000, as Vice President (Exploration) in Johannesburg, he resigned from Anglo American and co-founded Georeference Online Ltd (GOL) in Canada. GOL provides consulting services to the minerals exploration and mining industry and develops software applications for mineral exploration and the earth sciences in general. In 2017 Minerva purchased GOL’s artificial intelligence software and intellectual property, and appointed Mr. Smyth as its CEO.

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David Poole

Chief Software Architect

Professor Poole has been a professor in the department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia for 29 years and is also the director of UBC’s Laboratory for Computational Intelligence. He was the winner of the Canadian AI Association (CAIAC) Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013. Professor Poole is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and a Fellow of CAIAC. In addition, he is an associate editor of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. He was the former chair of the Association for Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence and a former associate editor of the Artificial Intelligence Journal. During the 2014-2015 academic year, Professor Poole was a Leverhulme Trust visiting professor at the University of Oxford. In 2000, he co-founded Georeference Online Ltd (GOL) to develop artificial intelligence applications in geology. In 2017 Minerva purchased GOL’s artificial intelligence software and intellectual property, and appointed Professor Poole as its Chief Software Architect. Professor Poole has published extensively in the fields of artificial intelligence, logic programming and reasoning with uncertainty. He is a co-author of two artificial intelligence textbooks, the second edition of the second book was recently published by Cambridge University Press, and the full text is available online.

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Charles Jenkins

CFO

Mr. Jenkins, BA, CPA, CGA, has broad experience in accounting, banking, securities regulation and corporate finance. He has served as the Chief Financial Officer for a number of Vancouver mining exploration and development companies, most recently Evolving Gold Corporation. He also has experience as the CFO of technology companies and a company in the natural foods industry. Prior to his involvement with public companies he previously worked in corporate finance with brokerage houses in Vancouver and Calgary.

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Chris Ahern

Chief Operating Officer

Mr. Ahern is a software engineer with 25 years of experience, ranging from the administration of back-end Unix and Windows servers and databases, to front-end web development. After graduating from the University of Natal, South Africa, he started his career in the telecommunications industry, first with Telkom South Africa and later at MTN, a large mobile carrier in South Africa. After moving to Vancouver, he worked in a small consulting firm installing and configuring wholesale billing solutions for various telecom companies around the world until he joined Georeference Online Ltd (GOL) in 2007. At GOL he was intimately involved in the development of the company’s AI software, as well as being Product Manager of its cloud-based exploration logistics management system, CampControl.

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Stephen M. Richard

CTO, semantics

Dr. Richard graduated in electrical engineering from MIT and holds an MSc in Geosciences from the University of Arizona and a PhD in geology from the University of California (Santa Barbara). Dr. Richard is a specialist in geoinformatics, having served in many related capacities, including that of Chair of the Council for Geoscience Information (CGI) Concept Definition Task Group from 2007 to 2013. From 1992 to 2016 he worked jointly for both the Geological Survey of Arizona and the USGS. He is currently on the Adjunct Faculty of the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University.